Vision

Here's my vision of a conversation between a parent and myself after the program has been available for 1-2 years. I've used the word "we" instead of "I" because I know that it is going to take more people than just myself to really make this happen.
 

“Hi Mary. Thanks for coming in and sharing your experience with us about this program.” “I’m happy to give my thoughts about this program. It has been a wonderful experience for my family.” “That’s great to hear. Let’s start with having you tell about your family.” “My husband and I have two small children. Our son is 3 years old and our daughter is 18 months. We both work full time outside of the home and so our children attend a home-based daycare. The best times for us to participate in community activities are nights and weekends. We found that many of the language rich experiences were being offered during the day but that was just not an option for us.” “It sounds like the variety of times and days made this program appealing to you. We worked hard to offer day, evening and weekend times for all of our activities so that we could reach as many families as possible. Tell us about some of your favorite activities offered through this program.”

“There were so many opportunities for language rich activities. Both of my children enjoyed the story times followed by a special make and take craft. A favorite was making a puppet and putting on a puppet show. The puppets are something that we often use at home and we have fun listening to their vocabularies grow as they tell stories using their puppets. Another favorite activity was the music class offered. My children had so much fun learning new songs about new topics. The instruments that we were introduced to gave us opportunities for new language. We were even given two take home instruments. Now we can have music nights at home and make up even more new songs. We were also given a CD of the songs used in the music class. The kids love singing along with these as we drive to daycare each day.”

“By participating in this program we also receive a picture book each month for each of our children. The kids love opening their package with their new book inside. Reading these books together allows us to show the joy in reading and talking about a story. Our home library has grown so much because of this program.”

“We’re so happy to hear that your family has had success with the program. Our goal was to create opportunities for rich language development. From what you have said it sounds like that is happening. Can you talk about how this program has increased your awareness on the importance of language development in children ages 0-5?”

“I have learned so much about language development through this program. During the monthly parent meetings, with childcare provided, I was able to see that I am my children's first teacher and that what we do as a family in our home helps our children not only be prepared for kindergarten but also for life long learning. The research that was presented during these meetings really made an impact on how I look at my role in my children's education. I feel more confident now that I’ve had this instruction on language development. What I’ve learned now is also going to benefit my children as they get older. I would recommend this program to anyone who has children ages 0-5.”

“We are so excited to know that you have had a positive experience with this program. It is our goal to support families in the area of language development through a variety of activities and information. Thank you for being your child’s first teacher.”

Teacher Evals

Came across this today and thought I would pass it on since we have talked some about this in class. I can't imagine being evaluated on scores from students that I have never taught. Where is the common sense in all of this? If they want to use scores then okay-but don't make it the main (or even 50%) part of the evaluation. Take into consideration student and parent input, observations and other variables (leadership opportunities and such). I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Book Study-Change

I'm participating in a book study of Change Leadership by Tony Wagner and Robert Kegan. It has been an interesting read so far. The authors discuss the importance of collaboration and its importance in the area of educators. I feel like my teaching partner and I collaborate every day about what is happening in our rooms. We also have weekly PLC time to discuss issues. Of course we would love more time to collaborate but we will take what we have and use it as best as we can. Another connection came when the authors defined the 7 Disciplines for Strengthening Instruction. Number 4 is "a shared vision of student results." I feel that at our school we do a great job of discussing student progress and tweaking our interventions to match the needs of our students. The authors also emphasize the role of making a commitment to the change and what the competing commitment might be. The competing commitment is what protects us from having to face the fears and discomforts that might come from our commitment to making a change. They emphasize that this isn't something that we probably want to shout out to others but that it is important to find so that we can move forward with the change. It's made me think about the competing commitments I possibly have and how to tackle them in order to make the changes I think are necessary.
I'm one that doesn't fear change but I also don't get really excited about change. I feel like every year of teaching (actually every day) provides change because we are always reflecting on how we taught and how well our students learned. Thinking about change on a larger scale is exciting and a bit overwhelming at the same time. We obviously need changes to occur so that we are teaching students what they actually need to know to go on to college and the work force.
It's exciting though to think about the changes that will occur from our work in this masters program.

Reading Bill-Great Article

As I was doing research for my project I came across the Kansas Coalition for School Readiness website. There I found this article. We had a long discussion during class last week about the reading bill and I thought this article confirmed many of our thoughts regarding the bill. Something else that is interesting is the fact of where the money will come from to support this bill. They want to use early childhood money. There is a petition you can sign to save the CIF. If you click here it will take you to a website to give you information and the petition. I would hate to see money taken away from the early childhood programs in our state to fund a bill that wants to retain 3rd graders. To me that does not make any sense at all.

Reading bill

After reading the new changes to the reading bill I'm left with even more questions. I am a first grade teacher and I would be discouraged to know that my students might be held back if they were not reading at a certain level. We work so hard on learning to read all throughout first grade. Many students come to us with the foundation to make great gains in their reading. Others come to us hardly knowing their sounds and having a very difficult time blending sounds. My project is focusing on increasing language in children 0-5. These are the times that are so crucial to a child's development (especially 0-3). How about we put more funding and resources at this level with many rich early literacy activities so that when they come to pre-k, kindergarten and first grade they have a great foundation for learning to read? I know that teachers play a huge role in teaching students how to read but this really starts in the home when children are young. I understand there are many reasons why families have a difficult time with helping their children be "school ready" but let's tackle that so we as teachers can help extend their learning. I want to teach all students and I want to help all students learn. We've talked in class before about how those that struggle with reading usually get pulled to do extra reading during subjects like science and social studies which they might be very interested in. We only have so many hours during the day and when we are working on those early literacy skills it has to be in place of something else. I'm going to respond to other blogs about this because many of you brought up great questions and thoughts.

Innovative School Bill

If McPherson school district was one of the chosen schools under the new innovative bill it would lead to many changes in our district. I feel that each teacher will have their own outlook on whether or not those changes are positive or negative. My thought is that it will bring about many positive changes.
I hear teachings talking about what it was like to teach before No Child Left Behind and all of the assessments. I don't have that background but I do have a desire to do what is best for children and I know that preparing them for a test is not what we need to be doing. If we are able to have this waiver from many of the current regulations it will hopefully create a classroom of unique, student driven learning.
I'm learning that I have a passion for the development of young children in our community and their education. I wonder what receiving this waiver would allow us to do for the 3 and 4 year olds in our community. If it helped us provide an enriched learning environment for any 3 or 4 year old whose family chose to send them that would be very exciting.
Since I do not teach at the grades where state tests are given I don't know if many teachers are still spending a lot of time teaching to the test. I know that our district has said not to do this but I also think many teachers worry about what will happen if their students do not do well. When I did teach 3-5 special education I was able to distance myself from that pressure because I knew that the test did not show what the students could do or anything that I didn't already know. With that said, there was still a lot of wasted learning time.
I have learned a lot about myself as a teacher and what my philosophy is. I think that it would be important for the district to somehow get all teachers to remember/figure out their philosophy and use that to help guide us through the changes that will occur if we get the waiver.
Change can be exciting and difficult all at the same time. It will take a lot of collaboration and thinking outside the box to make positive changes throughout the district. It's something to look forward to so that we can start to change the system of public education.

Changing Paradigms

I feel the video put into words what a lot of us are thinking. We are living in a much different time compared to when public education was created.
I liked his discussion on the power of imagination. It makes me think about my own children and how they can be so creative and imaginative. Then I think about how much imagination actually happens during the school day and it is much less. I feel like I try to allow for as much as possible but it seems like many times it is not possible. I already notice students in first grade who are afraid to do what they want on a project. They continually ask if what they are doing is okay and often say they can't do it. It's sad that by the age of 6 and 7 a lot of that creativity and imagination is gone. They often also want adults to do the work for them. I have to be very firm sometimes with them that I will help them but I will not do it for them.
His point about the hierarchy of curriculum also stuck out to me. We do focus so much on math, science and language arts. For the students who struggle they often miss the science lessons because of being in a small group during this time. This might be when they would excel the most. I know for our building we do our best to never pull them from PE, music, art, library or guidance but most of these are only once a week. We try to incorporate these areas into a lot of our other subjects but it just doesn't seem the same.
My concerns are that a lot of people agree with what he said but figuring out a solution is where we get stuck. I'm sure there are some places out there really trying to change education and I'm excited to learn about them but for our country as a whole it seems as though it will be a very slow process.
I am hopeful though that through this program and the projects that are being started, changes will be made in many different ways. We are leaders and we will need to have the courage to talk about how to do things differently so that we can help create a better future for public education.

Kansas Symbols and iPads

Every year during January we focus on Kansas Symbols and our first graders are responsible for completing a "project." We introduce the symbols, give the students information about them and then they are to create a poster or triarama with 3 facts about one symbol. So there is one adult in the room with 20 students trying to fill out a report page and create their poster/triarama. I'm sure you can guess that this has not gone very well for us. It has always bothered us (my teaching partner and I) that we are just giving the information to the students instead of them finding the information for themselves. Reading levels have always made this a challenge because we have some that can read informational text at a higher level but most of our students would have a very difficult time with this.
Now to this year. Things are different. Because of this masters program and reading blogs from our district technology guy we knew that we needed to make a change. We met with our technology guy and discussed lots of different options of how to go about this project. Some schools send it home for the students to complete at home but we knew that was not an option for our students (for many reasons) nor did we really want to give up on this project. We knew that for our students to research themselves we had to do a lot of the work up front and find information that was at their level or could be read by an adult to them. We also knew that short videos would be a great way for them to get the information they needed along with pictures so they could study the habitat and what the symbol looked like. Now that we had all this we needed a simple way for the students to get to the information. We decided to use QR codes. We put a lot of work into this on our collab day but the exciting part is now we have this for years to come. It's also something we can send home and students can access the information at home if they have something that will read QR codes.
Today was our first day and it was awesome. We are using our guided reading time because we have more adults available. The kids picked what they wanted to research and so everyone in the group is researching the same symbol. Each group has 1 iPad and today they scanned the QR codes and got their information. Tomorrow they will make their poster/triarama and Thursday they will decide on a way to present the information they have learned to the entire first grade. They can create a commercial, song, chant, or any other idea as long as it gives information about their symbol. We will then watch them next week on Kansas Day.
I'm sure that we will find ways to improve what we are doing this year but we're excited about trying something different. Any ideas you might have about how to improve this would be greatly appreciated. Happy Birthday Kansas!

Article, iPads and stuff

Many of you might have already read this article but I found it very interesting, especially the part about higher education and the on-line courses. I don't want to offend anyone who has taken on-line courses and enjoyed them but they are not for me. I spoke with a friend/colleague who is getting his masters right now and he mentioned that for the last semester they have to focus on a "project" (he is taking on-line courses). It makes me so happy to know that I am focusing on a project through my entire masters program and along the way I am going to be learning and doing so many different new things.
The break was just what I needed to get a bit refocused and have some down time. I am excited to get started again in February and ready to see what happens this next semester.
Today I used the iPads from the cart for the first time (I know-I'm way behind) but it was so much fun. My guided reading group loved being able to use the educreations app and for spelling we practice using the notes app. The educreations app allows you to record yourself talking and either writing or drawing at the same time (the person talking is not seen-just what they are drawing/writing). The students had to talk and draw about one of the objects that Froggy was trying to find and where it was when he found it. They loved being able to listen to themselves and see their drawing being drawn again. We are looking into how to do a multi-media presentation for our Kansas Symbols project in January. I'll let you know what we decide to do and how it turns out.
On a personal note we decided to begin the transition of making our 2 year old go to sleep on her own. When she climbed out of her crib in September and we had to turn her crib into a toddler bed our evening routine was flipped upside down. I spent 45 minutes to an hour every evening sitting by her bed waiting for her to fall asleep-then I would usually fall asleep. Now she is staying in her bed without me right next to her. There have been some tears but overall it is going great. So I might actually post something before 10:00 at night!!!
I hope everyone had a great break and wish you a terrific 2013.